Éamonn Fitzmaurice: This could be the start of something big for Tyrone
WE DID IT: Tyrone players celebrate with the Sam Maguire Cup after victory over Mayo in the All-Ireland SFC final at Croke Park.
Winning All-Irelands as part of a group is special and an immediate and everlasting bond is formed with your team-mates. However, at the final whistle on Saturday I was reminded just how personal everything is and how it always comes back to family when all is said and done.
Having finished my duties with RTÉ, I was walking down the sideline towards Hill 16 when I met a visibly moved Peter Canavan trying to compose himself before he went on camera again. I congratulated him and kept going. The pride he was feeling for his son Darragh was bursting out through him. He has obviously been there done that himself but the fact his own flesh and blood had just reached the pinnacle of the game clearly meant the world to him.
There were so many reasons Tyrone deservedly won Saturday’s All-Ireland final with excellent individual displays all over the pitch but for me, the most significant one was their help defence. It was outstanding and significantly shaped many other aspects of their game.
Having moved away from permanent sweepers as favoured by Mickey Harte, Brian Dooher and Fergal Logan deserve huge credit for this. To get this right takes a huge amount of work on the training pitch. It is systematic but there are plenty of moving parts and decision making involved in it. They are excellent at identifying and getting to danger to ‘put out the fires’ as Kieran McGeary said last week. They sprint there and double and treble up at times forcing turnovers.
This generates serious intensity, is hard to play against but requires enormous energy and concentration. This was particularly important against Mayo who love running hard through the middle of the pitch. When Tyrone turned over the Connacht champions they counter-attacked at pace and sucked them out of shape. Aidan O’Shea et al spent plenty of the game chasing Ronan McNamee and Pádraig Hampsey (who again scored a great outside of the boot point) back the pitch in these counter attacks. That saps energy that could be better spent attacking the other end. That is the cost of turnovers though, and it is why it is so important to minimise them against Tyrone as they again profited handsomely from them, scoring 1-7 from Mayo turnovers on Saturday.
Goals were always going to be huge in a contest where both sets of forwards were guilty of poor shooting and decision-making close to goal. Ryan O’Donoghue’s penalty miss will stay with him for a long time. He had just missed a very scoreable free albeit from a tricky angle that led to the penalty. It may have rattled his confidence as he had kicked magnificently and was Mayo’s best forward prior to that. It was a huge moment in the game. Mayo are a momentum team and a goal would have energised them and their supporters. Instead three minutes later Cathal McShane, having just been introduced, got a goal at the other end when only a point separated the teams and put the Ulster champions on the road to victory.
McShane’s movement for the goal was good as he checked back inside Oisín Mullen but Conor Meyler’s over the top delivery from the wing was accuracy personified and made the goal. The second goal came from a Niall Morgan (superb again) booming kickout that almost landed on the Mayo 45 metre line. They have been trying this all season with mixed results. They bravely stuck with it on Saturday and flipped the normal bias of short versus long kickouts by going long with 16 of their 25 kickouts, winning 12 of them. Critically, they scored a further 1-7 from this.
Mayo had been living dangerously on the Morgan boomer all day and Stephen Coen had intervened on more than one occasion when they were wide open. However once Conn Kilpatrick caught the ball and transferred it swiftly to an onrushing Conor McKenna, Mayo were completely exposed. McKenna delayed his pass until the perfect moment, slipping it to Darren McCurry to allow him to palm it into an empty net. Their decision-making and skill execution in the game deciding moments was in stark contrast to Mayo when they were presented with goal chances.
When the ball fell to Conor Loftus in the first half he tried to side step it in, when it would have made sense to pick it and finish. Aidan O’Shea had a great chance and chose to do the one thing he shouldn’t have which was shoot early. He could have dropped the shoulder and rounded the already committed Ronan McNamee or he could also have slipped in Loftus who was supporting him off the shoulder and would have surely scored. Tommy Conroy failed to test Morgan with his chance early in the second half and then we had the penalty. For Mayo to win they needed goals, and despite decent opportunities ended up with none. It is hard to know what to say about Mayo. On one side the question “where do they go from here?” could be posed but part of the identity of this team is that they will go away, dust themselves down and come back next season and will be in the conversation again.
In most of the finals that they have lost, they have died with their boots on but this one will hurt them the most because of their lack of performance. They will have Cillian O’Connor back and he will add to their forward options. Tommy Conroy and Ryan O’Donoghue will develop further but they still need a few more finishers upfront, even if they are being held to impact late on. Think of the significance of McShane and Canavan’s contributions after being introduced. They are not going to win an All-Ireland until they improve their play in the final third. When they can’t overrun teams with their athleticism and hard running game, they struggle to score enough. They lack variety upfront. They converted 15 of 31 scoring chances on Saturday. A total of 15 points with a shot accuracy of 48% won’t get the job done. Their style of play when going well is exciting and lifts the crowd but against the top teams that can block up the middle, turn them over and counter it becomes a hindrance. They are attacking in numbers, not scoring and then are out of shape.
When thinking about the way they play the charge of the light brigade comes to mind. The charge was tactically a disaster, but in the eyes of the Russians, the British cavalry appeared to know no fear. The action was summed up by the French commander General Pierre Bosquet who remarked, ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre; c’est de la folie’ It’s magnificent, but it’s not war; it’s madness’.
Mayo will need to add variation to their forward play for the 2022 season.
Brian Dooher and Fergal Logan deserve huge credit for what their team has achieved this year. In a normal season the rate of improvement would have been impressive but factoring in the condensed nature of the season and the Covid complications their development has been remarkable.
They have good players and are hanging around in the latter stages of the championship most years but perceiving them as champions pre season would have been fanciful, when they would have been ranked outside of the top five in most people’s eyes.
The order can be debated but Kerry, Dublin, Mayo, Donegal and Monaghan would all have been ahead of them. They beat four of that five on the way to Sam Maguire. The age profile of their squad would suggest they are at the start of something rather than at the end and they will grow further for this win.
That is all in the future though, for now it’s Tyrone’s world and we are all living in it.
